This Week in Apps: Facebook takes on Shopify, Tinder considers its future, contact-tracing tech goes live

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren't just a way to pass idle hours - they're a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.
In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep...Read more ...

Here's how note-taking app Evernote, once a high-flying unicorn startup, is 'going back to basics' by completely rebuilding its app to win back the skeptical users it lost

The note-taking app Evernote was one of Silicon Valley's first "unicorn" startups, but its growth slowed and it struggled to generate revenue as users complained about glitches, such as how its Android and iOS apps were incompatible with each other.
When Evernote recruited CEO Ian Small in late 2018, he realized that the company needed to completely rebuild its apps. Not only were they filled with bugs, but their tech core was a decade old, which slowed down new releases.
Rebuilding the product also involved a cultural change of more collaboration and transparency within the company...Read more ...